


Not Meant to Be Alone

by waterbird13



Series: Growing Old [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Introspection, Joe and Nicky die together, New immortals, Nile Freeman-centric, Nile's POV, but peaceful death, everyone we know but Nile is dead at the end of this, long lives, old Nile, very long time jumps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26030836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: Nile is four thousand years old, give or take, when she becomes the oldest.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Growing Old [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876672
Comments: 50
Kudos: 371





	Not Meant to Be Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!
> 
> So, full disclosure. I was never going to write this part. I thought it was too sad. But it wouldn't leave me alone.
> 
> It is sad! But also...peaceful?
> 
> It's important to know that all our main characters except for Nile die during or before this fic. BUT everyone has a peaceful death, gets relatively (physically) old, and is happy when they die. So. There's that.
> 
> (Also Joe and Nicky die together because it wouldn't be peaceful otherwise).
> 
> One note: I call the characters by the names they use in the movie. After thousands of years, the names would likely change dozens of times. This was easier as a writer, but it's also possible Nile would primarily think of them as the names they used when she met them.
> 
> This is just the logical conclusion of the Nile introspection series I have. Now she's very old. You probably need to read part two to fully understand the bits about Andy.
> 
> Thanks for reading; let me know if you like it.

Nile is four thousand years old, give or take, when she becomes the oldest.

The world looks nothing like the world she was born into. Continents have shifted, islands have been born, land has collapsed back into the sea. Global warming and climate change have ravaged the landscape and the world. Not that anyone born today would know different.

Andy dies sometime in the late 21st century, and Nile is a little ashamed to say that she can’t remember the exact year anymore. She knows it was still the twenty-first century because she remembers when she was born, and can logically work that out. Andy dies easy, with her family around her, and with a smile somehow in her face.

(Nile has mostly forgotten what Andy looked like, despite her desperate clawing attempts to keep that memory. But she still remembers that smile).

They bury Andy with her Labrys, which Andy would have bitched and moaned about—she hadn’t been able to properly lift it for several years, at that point—but they do it anyways. None of them are going to take it up, not even Nile. Not even Quynh, who holds it for a long, long moment, presses the handle to her mouth, softly, gently, before resting it carefully in Andy’s withered hands, across her chest.

Andy doesn’t need an axe to be dangerous, but it’s hers nonetheless.

They buried Andy at that house, and Nile would visit for the first few centuries. The place is long gone now, but Nile is not as broken up about it as she once thought she’d be. She looks around at people wherever she goes, whenever she goes, and that’s where she finds Andy. They don’t know it, but the ripple effects of Andy have shaped the world, even thousands of years after her death.

Quynh breaks her leg two hundred years after Andy dies. When it’s healed—and she seems to marvel at the process, the two months of being laid up in a way she hasn’t in thousands of years—she stores her guns and bow and says it’s about time.

“I knew I would never be that far behind Andromache,” she dismisses, and Nile wonders about getting old enough that two hundred years is a short timespan.

Quynh opens an orphanage for the climate refugees. Nile knows her own relationship with Quynh isn’t as strong as it is with the others, considering the time Quynh has spent away. But she doesn’t think she’s the only one who is a little leery of this.

Booker stops them from saying anything, though. “Let her go,” he murmurs.

Joe and Nicky shrug. They knew Quynh for five hundred years before the ocean, but Booker and Quynh have watched each other heal and rebuild.

Quynh dies fifty two years later, and hundreds of former children come to her funeral. Nile watches them leave a marker for her headstone, watches them stop by her grave, and sees Quynh’s face in every one of them.

Booker goes next. He lives to be just over a thousand, and he’s not like he was. He’s better, more solid, perhaps permanently stained by grief but also functioning. Not drowning anymore.

Andy once told her, so long ago, to find purpose. She has, she’s found causes to support and fights to get into. Maybe Booker never has, not like the rest of them.

Maybe the family is his purpose. Whatever he feels, he seems happier with them.

They’re looking down the end of the third millennium CE—that designation is falling out of common use, and Nile will have to adapt eventually, but it’s hard to throw away the calendar and time markers she’s used to, even if she’s closer to a thousand than not these days—when Booker cuts himself shaving.

He touches it all day, every day, until it heals, a look of wonder on his face. “You’d think you discovered the meaning of life,” Joe grumbles.

Booker shrugs. “Maybe I have.”

He leaves the field, and buys a failing bookshop in what once was France. They tease him a bit for selling mass market paperbacks on the first floor and keeping his priceless collection of books in the apartment on the second floor. That apartment is wall-to-wall books, with a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and cot. Booker is already in heaven.

He starts going by Sebastien again, he writes a novel, spends too long recommending books to strangers and regulars, especially children, and he lives another forty years.

Joe, Nicky, and Nile buy a house ten miles outside the city. They take short jobs, but they always come back. Nile, for her part, spends more time reading than she has in centuries.

Sebastien dies surrounded by them and his books, in the apartment above the shop he loves, with pale sunlight sneaking in through the windows. Joe and Nile hold his hands, and Nicky strokes his thinning hair until he passes.

“Just us now,” Joe says a week later. They’ve buried Sebastien, in the vicinity of where they think his wife might be buried, gone almost a millennium now. They’ve cleared out the house, taking only what they need even though they all know without speaking that they won’t be back here for a while.

Booker is dead and buried forty years when they dream of a new one.

Another soldier, perhaps to no one’s surprise. War doesn’t look like it did when Nile died, nevermind when Joe and Nicky died. Still, war remains war, Joe once told her. Ugly and cruel. It stains everyone it touches; it’s only a question of degree.

They’re all soldiers, and Nile’s talked herself in circles trying to figure that out. It’s exhausting and for the most part she doesn’t bother anymore. Philosophical debates that go on for eternity weigh on the soul.

It takes twenty-one hours to find the new one. Dara is still covered in her own blood, and she stabs Nicky through the thigh before they can get her calmed down.

Two days and a thousand miles later, Nile groans. “Did I have so many questions?”

Nicky stops cooking and considers it. “No. But then again, we were forced to show you through…experience.”

Those first miserable days are a hazy fog for Nile now. She does remember the sharp fear of not knowing, though. And that’s enough to invigorate her to answer one thousand more daily questions.

Somewhere in there, Nile turns a thousand. Nicky and Joe celebrate with her.

Chicago doesn’t exist anymore. The United States doesn’t exist anymore. The land doesn’t even look the same, and no one speaks English anymore. Still, they take her “home.”

She leaves with them, arm in arm, and meets Dara at the safe house.

Somewhere along the way, they pick up two more. Nile suddenly realizes that not only is she  _ old _ , but that everyone else, everyone but Nicky and Joe, is so  _ young _ .

Joe and Nicky, in typical Joe and Nicky fashion, wake up with hickies shortly after their five thousandth anniversary.

“Not quite as old as Andromache,” Nicky muses, studying Joe’s throat. There’s a handful of sucked-in bruises, more than Nile’s ever needed to know about their sex life. Nicky seems fascinated, and Nile absently realizes he never would have had the opportunity to see them on Joe before, not for more than maybe a second or two.

“Mmm, but what a life, hm?” Joe asks, taking Nicky’s hand.

They have to agree.

Joe and Nicky step back from the field, but not from the team. As age begins to take them, as grey shoots through Joe’s beard and the lines around Nicky’s eyes grow exponentially, they really do look like wise old sages.

Nile is, at four thousand years old, mostly at peace with life. She has a team to lead, after all.

(Whatever else she forgets, she never loses that promise she made Andy).

It’s when Nicky needs a cane that she grows irrationally angry, brewing and bubbling deep inside her. This too will be taken away from her.

She mourned Andy, Quynh, and Booker. She mourned her family, and her brother’s descendants. She cried and carried that grief. She did not rage and demand answers from her God, a God all but forgotten on this planet. But now, she rages.

Joe and Nicky wait her rage out, patient, then hug her close. Part of her wants to be even more angry at their peace, but she’s burned out.

“Everything dies,” Nicky murmurs against her temple. “It’s our time, Nile.”

“Besides, what a life.”

Nile bites her lip. She shouldn’t be selfish right now. It’s their life, and their death. They should control the tone of their last years. By all accounts, they will get to go out as they always wanted.

Still. It’s one more thing being taken from her. Joe and Nicky, who have been there the longest, who she can’t even comprehend living without anymore.

“You’ll keep the team together?” Joe’s hand cups her cheek, eyes boring into hers.

She swallows. Doesn’t ask why she has to be the one to pick up the pieces, to keep moving.

Everyone dies eventually. It’s just not her time yet. And until then, she made a promise.

Nicky closes his eyes and leans against her. “It won’t be the same.”

Joe nods. “We won’t be here. Don’t leave a hole for us.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, the sudden memory of  _ Andy _ . She has never forgotten her promise, and apparently Joe and Nicky haven’t forgotten it either.

“But keep going, yeah?”

“We’re not meant to be alone.”

Nile doesn’t open her eyes, but a few tears slip out anyways. Andy made her make the same promise four thousand years ago. She must have made Joe and Nicky make the same vow.

She nods.

She brushes up on her medical knowledge, and Nicky and Joe move to a home on the beach on what once might have been called a Mediterranean island. 

They go together. One day they don’t come down to breakfast. The others send Nile to get them, but she already knows.

She buries them there, together as always, their swords resting together in the space next to Joe, and when she walks away from that grave she’s four thousand years old and the oldest person on the planet.

Her team meets her, picks up the weight of her weary, tired soul. She knows they’ve closed up the house, knowing she wouldn’t be ready to do that.

They walk into town to find a transport to  _ somewhere else _ , and Nile sees Joe and Nicky in every person they pass. Booker, Quynh, Andy. Maybe even herself.

And, right now, that’s enough.


End file.
